“Aiyah, Aiyah!”
I worried that Bwenawa might have a heart attack. He was ecstatic. Again he hauled with all his might. Watching him was like watching a heavyweight tug-of-war. He heaved. He worked the fish. He released a hard-fought yard of line and then pulled it back in. As the fish neared, I could see that it was long and slender. “What do you think, Beiataaki? A sea pike?”
“No,” he said. “That’s a barracuda.”
A great barracuda. It was nearly four feet long. It was a primordial fish. It looked like it belonged in another era, when the size of one’s teeth was the most important thing in determining whether you survived or not. It too was clubbed, more thoroughly than the tuna. Even so, Bwenawa could not bring himself to retrieve the hook. “I don’t like those teeth,” he said. Beiataaki gingerly unclasped the hook from Jaws and again the line was drawn out behind the boat.
“Let’s see the I-Matang fish,” Atenati taunted.
“I may need some magic,” I replied.
I took the line, but not before applying some more sunscreen. After a day sailing the equatorial Pacific, I could feel my freckles mutating into something interesting and tumorous. I tugged the line and just like that I had a fish; and just like that I realized that applying sunscreen a moment before grasping a wispy fishing line that was connected to a fish, and I believed it was a mighty fish, was not a particularly clever thing to do. I don’t think Hemingway would have made the same mistake. Then again, Hemingway had a fishing rod, which as I struggled with this behemoth from the depths, struck me as an eminently useful tool for fishing. I held on to the line with one hand, while trying to wipe the grease from the other on my shorts. I was dangling precariously over the edge of the boat. My arm felt like it would soon spring from its socket. I believed I had hooked a tiger shark.
“Hey, I-Matang!” Atenati yelled. “In Kiribati we fish with two hands.”
Atenati was always helpful. Just as I was finally able to maintain a firm grip on the line, I began to notice a stinging sensation on my hands, which as I battled with my sea beast, began to rapidly spread to my arms and chest. It was a burning, itchy feeling, the kind that soon leaves its sufferer in a state of frothy madness. “I itch!” I cried. “Something stings!”
“It’s only sea lice,” Beiataaki informed me.
What the fuck were sea lice? So typical, I thought. Even the ocean in Kiribati has lice.
Atenati began to cackle. I wondered if she had anything to do with it. I gave her the evil eye.
I struggled with my monster. I heaved and hauled. My muscles ached. I put my legs into it. I was engaged in an epic confrontation between man and beast and I was determined to win. I would demonstrate my prowess as a hunter. I would serve notice to the fish world that there was a new master in town. This shark was mine.
Only it wasn’t a shark. Nor was it a great barracuda. Or a tuna. No, it was an itsy-bitsy trevally, a little more than a foot long, and as I finally hoisted it out of the water, I was struck by its dainty color, a shimmering blue-green. No one clubbed my fish.
“Aiyah, Aiyah,” Bwenawa said, with a decided lack of oomph.
I continued to itch.
“I feel sorry for the fish,” Sylvia said. “Look, its colors are fading.”
We stared at the fish. Flop, flop. Pant, pant. And then it was no more. I felt like my dominance over the fish world had not yet been conclusively demonstrated. And then Atenati yelled: “Look!”
We all turned.
Oh-oh.
The sea monsters depicted by early explorers in the Pacific no longer seemed so fanciful. Not far off the bow was an immense creature. We watched its dark silhouette displace water like an indolent torpedo. It could only be here, at reef’s edge, for one reason. It was hungry.
“Is it a whale?” asked Bwenawa. “A pilot whale?”
“It’s huge,” Sylvia noted
“Jesus,” I said.
Beiataaki stared long and hard. “Thresher shark,” he declared.
I suddenly noticed how small our boat was. I remembered that it was made of plywood. Thin plywood. Thin and old plywood. Thin and old and rotting plywood. Thin and old and rotting and easily breached plywood. Imperceptibly, I moved to the middle of the boat. What were we thinking, washing fish blood off the deck in shark-infested waters? A patch of water where sharks can be confused with whales.
About forty yards distant, we watched a tail fin, a tail fin that rose four feet out of the water, of which it followed that another four feet were under water, suggesting a tail fin of eight feet—an eight-foot tail fin!—and it was coming our way.
“There’s my shark!” Atenati declared. “Bwenawa! Catch me that shark!”
Bwenawa was already rummaging around for a stronger line and a bigger hook. Beiataaki was slicing up his ray. The shark was nearing. Swish-swish went its eight-foot tail fin.
Fuck.
These people were insane. I looked at Sylvia. She had a look of glee about her. You too, woman?
Beiataaki began to toss chunks of ray overboard. Bwenawa was fiddling with gear. Atenati was beside herself. “There’s my shark. This way. This way.”
The shark listened. It neared. And then it submerged. And then it became a shadow. An enormous shadow. This was exactly what Steven Spielberg would have the shark do. I could hear the music. Do-do-do-do do-do-do-do. The shark passed underneath the boat. It was at least twenty feet long. I braced myself for that moment of impact, when this mass of muscle and teeth would shoot up and shatter the boat, tossing us into the water, and oh, the horror of it then.
Beiataaki moved to the other side of the boat as the shark glided underneath. He was throwing big chunks of ray into the water. I did not encourage this. It was as if we were at some duck pond in a park, merrily feeding the quackers. But this was not a duck. This was a twenty-foot shark.
“They’re crazy,” I offered.
“Yes,” Sylvia said. We stood watching, agape. Two forces, both irrational and armed, were about to collide.
But the shark was having none of it, bless him. He was a smart shark. A good shark. He just kept on swimming, leaving a turbulent wake with his eight-foot tail fin. Swish, swish. I began to like the shark. I liked the shark for swimming away. Swim, shark, swim. Off you go. Leave these fools behind you.
“Bwenawa!” Atenati screeched. “You didn’t catch my shark!”
“Ha-ha.” Bwenawa seemed energized. A yellowfin tuna, a great barracuda, and, if they had just been a little better prepared, a twenty-foot thresher shark. He was in good spirits.
THE DAY WAS FADING. We drew in the fishing line in and began to search for the channel into Maiana Lagoon. John had installed a Global Positioning Satellite receiver on board, but its accuracy was not fine enough to navigate a crooked thirty-foot-wide channel that meandered through a boat-chomping reef. The channel was marked by wooden stakes, and as we approached, lowering our sail, two frigate birds took to the air, flying in tandem, their angular wings extended, seeking an updraft to carry them elsewhere. Beiataaki climbed the mast and guided Tekaii through the reef. Here was a plump display of brain coral. There a luminous coral garden. Here a jagged finger. All of it just a yard or two distant from our hulls. The ocean seemed to trip as it encountered the reef, sending forth rolling plumes of white water. I wondered how Maiana managed to get any supplies at all. Everything would have to be offloaded in the deep water, and transported through the reef and across another four miles of lagoon by a smaller vessel.
Beiataaki gestured from his perch in the mast. Left, now right, hard right, hard right. Tekaii’s eyes were focused solely on Beiataaki as he manipulated the rudder. Even a simple scrape against the bristling reef could sink us. We were still a long distance from land, too far to swim. Twenty long minutes passed. No one except Beiataaki and Tekaii exchanged a word. There was tension on the boat, the giddiness had dissipated. And then we were through and into the relative safety of the lagoon. Beiataaki clambered down from the mast, shaking his
head. “I don’t like this channel. It’s the worst in Kiribati.”
Ahead we could see a green palisade of trees that soon sharpened into the minaret stems of coconut trees and the great tumbling canopies of breadfruit trees. We motored across the lagoon toward the middle of Maiana, where just as on every other island in Kiribati, the government maintains a station, called Government Station, which struck me as very Conradian. This was where the island’s guesthouse was located, as well as a first-aid clinic, a secondary school, and a fisheries office. A few maneabas were visible and then entire villages of thatch and stilts.
“The wind is changing,” Beiataaki noted. “A westerly.”
The wind vane began to flutter and twirl. Suddenly it hit us, a few gusts that threatened to take our hats, followed by a sustained gale that quickly turned a placid lagoon into white-streaked chop. I had never seen wind turn and strengthen so quickly, not even in Holland, where, typically, one can expect the wind to strengthen the moment you get on a bicycle and to turn as you do, so that no matter which direction you bike you will always be biking into a gale-force headwind. This was different. On a languid, sunny day the wind direction had changed by 180 degrees and hardened into a forty-five-knot gale within two minutes. This did not threaten the boat; the sail was down, the lagoon was shallow, and waves splattered harmlessly against the hull. Still, I had grown accustomed to the torporous monotony of equatorial weather, and now deeply regretted not bringing my windsurfer.
Beiataaki anchored Martha in shallow water just off the beach near Government Station. We gathered our gear and waded in. The coconut trees were bent by the wind, their canopies folded in like collapsed umbrellas. I could hear the dull thuds of coconuts loosened by the wind. Children on the beach ran with outstretched lavalavas like gangly birds at takeoff. Our accommodations were on the ocean side of the atoll and we walked along a path that crossed the breadth of Maiana, about a hundred yards, taking care to avoid the trajectories of falling coconuts. The guesthouse was a gray cinder-block house with a dirt floor. It had a living area with a hammock. The sleeping quarters were arranged like horse stalls with hard bunks and mosquito nets. A well and a bucket supplied our water needs.
On this side of the island we remained in the wind’s shadow, and, despite the gale, we were able to get a fire going and grill Bwenawa’s barracuda. The tuna was left with Beiataaki and Tekaii, who had quickly turned Martha around and were racing across the lagoon to navigate the channel before sunset. They planned to sail through the night back to Tarawa and return a week later to pick us up. As the day diminished into an opaque dusk, we could see the ocean churning in the graying light, deep chasms were carved as the wind sent waves rushing and hissing across the horizon. Rain began to pelt the guesthouse. Leaks appeared in the roof. Pools of water turned the floor into mud.
“I think it is raining on Tarawa too,” Bwenawa said. We hoped it was. We hoped this storm marked the end of the drought.
“Just think of it,” I said to Sylvia. “Full water tanks.”
“Provided that the water actually gets into the tanks,” she said dryly.
Sylvia still had little faith in my fixing abilities. But I was confident. I had spent hours clearing the roof and gutters of leaves and nettles. I had, very ingeniously I thought, used the materials at hand to plug the holes in the gutter—plastic lids and an extremely valuable roll of electrical tape.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a Dutchman. And Dutchmen know how to channel water.”
“You’re only half Dutch,” Sylvia noted. “And you left Holland when you were six.”
“It’s an innate knowledge. We’re water people. Soon, you’ll be able to wash your hair guilt-free.”
“Twice a week?”
“Twice a week. I promise.”
We paused to listen. It was an angry storm.
“I am glad we’re not on the boat now,” Atenati said. We all pondered for a moment what it must be like for Beiataaki and Tekaii, sailing Martha through the black darkness of a starless night, the ocean a violent maelstrom, rogue waves unseen. And then we went to sleep.
CHAPTER 13
In which the Author discusses how unfuckingbelievably scary the South Seas can be.
The next day, in the dim blue light of a tempestuous dawn, we were surprised to see Martha anchored in the lagoon, the boat battened down like a fortress.
“Too rough,” Beiataaki said when we encountered him on the beach. He had sailed the Gilbert Islands for thirty years. His skin was blotched from sun damage. His face was creased from wind. That he had declared the conditions too rough for sailing, particularly when he did not have any queasy landlubbers on board, suggested some intense roughness indeed. “We got through the channel, but then the waves were too big to keep sailing,” he said. “We’ll try again later.”
But they did not try again later. As the days passed, the storm did not. Each day saw Maiana swept with wind and rain. Papaya trees were felled. Maneabas lost their roofs. The island was bathed in a dismal gray. Villages were sodden. Women shivered as Atenati conducted cooking demonstrations, showing how island-grown vegetables rich in vitamin A could be used in the local diet, alleviating the night blindness that stalks malnourished children in Kiribati. Bwenawa returned to the guesthouse late in the afternoons, having spent his days roaming from garden to garden, offering tutorials on the proper sun-to-shade ratio for optimal tomato growth and spreading the wonders of chaya, bele, and nambere, the only green leafy vegetables that grew on an atoll. Making the weedy leaves edible was Atenati’s job.
In the maneabas, the unimane fretted about the wind and the harm it had inflicted. Each village had at least one maneaba with a damaged roof and the old men were concerned about the lack of young men with sufficient maneaba-building skills. The population on Maiana was dwindling as each year more of its young people were lured by the flickering lights of Tarawa.
Sylvia and I grew ever more intimate as we made do without a mirror.
“You have eye gunk.”
“You’ve got a booger.”
“There’s something…”
“Where… here?”
“No… not…”
“Did I get it?”
“Here… let me.”
As the storm ebbed and flowed, with rain showers followed by hard winds, Maiana seemed a gloomy, dejected island, enlivened only—from my perspective—by the unbearably pleasant feeling of coolness, a briskness to the air that meant I could now go through a day without risking dehydration, without feeling the need to douse my food with salt, without succumbing to the torpor of midday, when, typically, the entire country’s energy level is reduced to just a shade above comatose. I had long wondered why the temperate world was so much more advanced than the equatorial world, but it seemed obvious to me now that the heat was the key. How productive are New York and Paris in August? Not very, and they have air-conditioning. Now imagine the perpetual August without the cool breath of a humming air conditioner. Would New Yorkers still be working eighteen-hour days, churning out lawsuits and magazines? Would anyone care if Cisco dropped by forty points? No. In the perpetual August, New Yorkers would spend their workdays draped and drooling over their desks, just like the government of Kiribati.
There was another unexpected benefit brought about by the wind. It was too rough to fish, and we had resigned ourselves to rice-intensive meals, when Kiriaata, the gracious caretaker of the guesthouse, apologized for the lack of dinner options. “I can make the chicken curry,” she said, holding up a rusty can of Ma-Ling Chicken Curry, which I knew from hard experience contained only those parts of the chicken that even the Chinese would not eat—gizzards and bones. “Or we can have crayfish,” Kiriaata offered, reaching for four of the largest, most delectable lobsters I had ever seen. “I am sorry. That is all we have.”
Sylvia and I mewed and groaned and made all sorts of deeply primal noises.
“You want chicken curry?”
“No!” we barked. “Cra
yfish.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
The I-Kiribati do not have a taste for lobster. I believed this was because their taste buds died when the English arrived. Not only was the I-Kiribati diet pretty grim to begin with, it was now enhanced with canned corned beef and “cabin biscuits,” the staples of the nineteenth-century seaman’s rations. This combination of atoll food with English food that can survive for years and years on a boat had destroyed the I-Kiribati palate. I thought it would be impolite to test this theory on Bwenawa, so I simply asked him why the I-Kiribati don’t like lobster. He explained that they regarded lobster as a disgusting reef cleaner, and he looked at me knowingly, until finally I said: “Ah, yes, I see your point.”
It mattered not. While I might not have eaten a lobster caught on the reef in South Tarawa, a quick risk analysis of the situation on Maiana suggested that I could eat a lobster and probably maintain my health, and even if I did get sick it certainly wouldn’t be the first time I’d gotten sick eating in Kiribati, and at least I would have had the pleasure of actually eating something I liked.
“I don’t suppose you have any butter or a lemon here?” I asked Kiriaata.
“Akia,” she said.
Nevertheless, it was the tastiest meal I ever ate in Kiribati. Bwenawa and Atenati eyed us warily as we slavered over our lobster.
“Uumh…”
“Oooh…”
“Aaah…”
We asked, if it wasn’t too much trouble, if we could have lobster every night. Each evening Bwenawa and Atenati picked at their tinned chicken gristle, while we ate our lobsters with ill-disguised obscenity. Not knowing when such an opportunity might present itself again, we took a few lobsters with us when it was time to depart Maiana.
The Sex Lives of Cannibals Page 16